What then! Was she his mother? Had she asked for a child, whom she must
nurse through the nights, for her lover. She despised him, she despised
him, she hardened her heart. An infant crying in the night, this Don
Juan.
Ooh, but how she hated the infant crying in the night. She would murder
it gladly. She would stifle it and bury it, as Hetty Sorrell did. No
doubt Hetty Sorrell's infant cried in the night--no doubt Arthur
Donnithorne's infant would. Ha--the Arthur Donnithornes, the Geralds of
this world. So manly by day, yet all the while, such a crying of
infants in the night. Let them turn into mechanisms, let them. Let them
become instruments, pure machines, pure wills, that work like
clock-work, in perpetual repetition. Let them be this, let them be
taken up entirely in their work, let them be perfect parts of a great
machine, having a slumber of constant repetition. Let Gerald manage his
firm. There he would be satisfied, as satisfied as a wheelbarrow that
goes backwards and forwards along a plank all day--she had seen it.
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